Tuesday, December 22, 2009

a birth-anniversary . . .

Kenneth Rexrothborn: December 22, 1905

Kenneth’s Rexroth’s poetry, once read – and I had to find it on my own, it wasn’t taught in school (it probably still isn’t) – hit big. Big such that I had to read it all (about 750 pages in the aggregate, not counting translations). Over the years, I still go for it all. At their best, Rexroth’s poems have a sharp, aware, wide-ranging, confident intelligence, and a directness of language, that I easily enthuse about.

That many of the poems almost define, and precisely so, certain timeless realities of living in San Francisco (I’m a native) and the Bay Area, just about seals the deal for me. Consider for example these two lines from “Past And Future Turn About” that neatly encapsulate the unusual phenomenon when acres and miles of browned over (some say golden) grasslands and hills, parched from the dry late spring and summer months in Northern California, come alive when the weather turns wet as winter approaches:

The green spring that comes in NovemberWith the first rains has restored the hills.

Nuthin’ fancy there, quite the contrary. But ever since I read those two lines, the wondrous transformation seen every year after the first rains (and it is wondrous) has become in my mind “the green spring of November.” Ol’ Rexroth has set that particular image for life. Ditto with the following line:

Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming from the ocean . . .

Look south when the fog’s blowing in, especially in the winter when that constellation moves east to west through the City’s night sky, and Rexroth’s image, found in “Toward An Organic Philosophy,” seems exactly perfect.

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As you can deduce, I can get going, and quick, on Rexorth’s poetry. My enthusiasm here contains multitudes, and I on this birth anniversary could go in any of about one hundred different directions.

I could – and maybe should – write about Rexroth and the Devil’s Gulch area of Samuel P. Taylor Park in Marin County. Rexroth spent long periods of many summers there, in an abandoned cabin, especially during the gas-rationed World War II years. He wrote a dozen or so great poems set in Devil’s Gulch, which despite its name is an angelic coastal hills side-canyon of forest (oak, laurel, Douglas fir, madrone, and ferns), open sunny ridges, a beautiful little creek, and a meadow; during the right times of year, a waterfall and/or wildflowers galore bloom.

Devil’s Gulch - Samuel P. Taylor Park, Marin County

This place is so grand – and please forgive a personal interlude here, but you’ll see it does relate – that four years ago today I proposed marriage in the Gulch, on what happened to be the 100th anniversary of Rexroth’s birth (love you, Mary!).

A whole other post could be devoted, and properly so, to Rexroth’s decision – quite purposefully made – to shift from a more difficult-to-get, almost cubist, type of poetry and instead embrace poetry based on direct statement. “I feel at this time,” he wrote in the early 1950s, “when the world is mortally ill, poetry, as a symbolic criticism of values, should reach as many people as possible, and speak as clearly as possible, without compromising its intent.”

And, as another example, a post, many posts actually, could be written about the relationship, or seeming lack of it, between Rexroth the person and the “voice” sometimes presented in his poems. In some ways, what’s in his poetry – for example, the self-evident erudition and certain passions (as for the mountains) – is entirely consistent with the biographic details.

However, and as many have pointed out, sometimes there seems a shocking disconnect between the poet and the poems. Most pointedly, it’s sobering and disturbing to try and reconcile certain of Rexroth’s (to be blunt) very ugly character traits, including an explosive temper and sexist, demanding, rude, and violent interactions with the women closest to him, with his large number of poems marked by quiet tender sensitivity with love and deep respect for others. The so-far standard biography, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth by Linda Hamalian (W.W. Norton, 1991), has plenty of details, if you’re interested.

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Today, though, on this particular birth-anniversary, I go in a different direction than those suggested above. I take a look at a specific poem – titled “Prolegomena To A Theodicy” or sometimes “A Prolegomenon To A Theodicy” – that in addition to being interesting in itself has a mighty interesting early history.

And I think “mighty interesting” understates it. Listen to this (forgive me if you know this story): “Prolegomena To A Theodicy” (as it was then known), or at least an excerpt of it, first saw print in the almost fabled Louis Zukofsky edited “Objectivists” issue of Poetry (February 1931):

In addition, the following year, the entire poem – and it’s a long one, in ten sections that run some 23 pages in Rexroth’s Complete Poems (Copper Canyon Press) – was first printed in the Zukofsky-edited An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932), another fabled (and today very scarce) publication:

Rexroth’s work in the anthology (there was a second poem as well) occupies more space than anyone other than Zukofsky.

On top of all that – and this is truly a trip, given the stature today of the poets involved – “Prolegomena” inspired Zukofsky to work up a greatly condensed version of the poem’s first section, reducing its 179 lines to 91, with this stripped down re-mix also being included in An “Objectivists” Anthology.

My intent here today is to introduce Rexroth’s poem, to enthuse a bit about certain of its lines, and along the way show a bit of what Zukofsky did with it, and why.

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“A Prolegomenon To A Theodicy” (to use the title Rexroth settled on when the poem was re-printed in the 1950s and thereafter) is one of about a half-dozen poems he wrote, in the late 1920s and very early 1930s, in a style utterly different from the poetry of direct statement he soon thereafter adopted and then wrote in for his remaining 50 years. These early poems were – and probably still could be – considered experimental, having a cubist and Steinian way with words, a mix of fragments (very short lines) and prose, unanchored details and philosophic assertions, and “meaning” that most often arises from intuition, not logic.

According to Linda Hamalian, Rexroth’s biographer, Carl Rakosi, another of the poets included in An “Objectivists” Anthology, was puzzled that this long, sometimes very loose, Rexroth poem was included. According to Hamalian, Zukofsky suggested to Rakosi that “the appeal of the pattern” was the poem’s strong point.

The opening lines of “Prolegomena,” quoted above, certainly have patterns, plenty of them: the repetitions of “the,” the doubled “Aboard aboard,” “rustles rustles,” the repetition of “worm” and “lion” in respective succeeding lines, the parade of colors (five of ‘em), and more generally, a distinct if irregular rhythm built on varying but mostly fragmented lines of phrases or, in the final line quoted above, the shortest possible (one and two word) sentences. Patterns galore, eh Louis?

Were there other things in Rexroth’s poem that Zukofsky perhaps liked, maybe tendencies might have identified in other “Objectivists”? Well, that in part depends on what it is, in poetry, that “Objectivists” did (or do). Zukofsky in An Anthology’s preface (titled “‘Recencies’ in Poetry”) emphasized that his contributors were NOT in a movement. But he also wrote something quite telling, and something clearly at the core of the work of the “Objectivists”:

. . . the interest of poets is after all in particulars. Poems are only acts upon particulars, outside of them. Only thru such activity do they become particulars themselves–i.e. poems.

Look again, if you please, at the opening lines of Rexroth’s poem. See any particulars? Do you think Zukofsky did? Wait – don’t guess, don’t guess, because you can actually see the answer in black and white. Here, from a microfilm copy of An “Objectivists” Anthology, are the lines from the Rexroth quoted above that Zukofsky uses in his edited-down version of “Prolegomena”:

It seems clear, doesn’t it, that Zuk’s changes work to emphasize the particulars? Now, I can’t go too far with this: the three and one-half pages of the Zukofsky-ized Rexroth poem doesn’t totally abjure lines of philosophic assertion (“It should be observed that this principle leads unavoidably / to endless regress”) or examples of meta-language (“O.O.O.O.O”), and sometimes, as in the example above (e.g., “the fatigued worm”), details are deleted too. But Zuk’s mix does – as you will see if you ever get a hold of a copy to read (hey, just try me) – heavily emphasizes particulars.

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Both the Rexroth and Zukofsky versions use, and use in full, a passage that’s always struck me as the most memorable set of lines in “Prolegomena” / “A Prolegomenon.” The passage, sixteen lines of which I’ll share here, ends the fourth sub-part of the first section. Curiously, it’s close in approach, maybe more so than any other part of the poem, to Rexroth’s later, more direct style. style. In any event, the lines relate or arise from, it would seem, Rexroth’s experiences in Washington State, where (per his biographer) he’d spent time in the mid- and late 1920s.

The details, the particulars Rexroth marshals here, are incredible. I especially like, “A snarl of leaves” but I’m getting ahead of myself, or ahead of you, please forgive me. Also incredible, and you’ll see this in the lines towards the end of the excerpt, is the way the words reflect, and reflect on, the disorienting oddly energized aftermath of a sleepless night. The hallucinatory and nightmarish rush, in other words, of an all-nighter. We’ve all been there, and even if we haven’t all seen, as Rexroth apparently did, a “procession of cynocephali,” we can I think understand.

This excerpt is so good, I’m going to end this birth-anniversary post with it. I’m hoping, as it always does with me, that this snaps your focus right to the words, the lines, the poetry:

We ferry the Skagit pulling ourselves along a cableThe mountains are purple and grey the valley is green the river is whiteMilk of glaciersIn Horseshoe Basin the horses bled crossing the snowA snarl of leavesThe curve of fleshEvening and a lightI walk in sunsetI walk in sunriseIn the meantime I have been up all nightI have seen at a speed of three hundred kilometers a second the great nebula of Andromeda rushing upon meThe acoleuthic sensation is still with meThe procession of cynocephaliHysteresis the shattered stone

Thanks Conrad, for the kind words, and even before that, for stopping in and reading. It's much appreciated.

I don't go so far as to praise a higher being about Rexroth's switch to a more direct style. It's grand poetry, no question, and I love it. But these early poems fascinate me.

The other one in An "Objectivists" Anthology is titled "Fundamental Disagreement with Two Contemporaries." It's dedicated to Tzara and Breton, and engages, sometimes satirically, the dada/surealist ways. Among other mind-bending stuff, it has two lines that go like this:

Tzara, Breton are very important poets in my view. Nomadic authors that have always pounded lazy complacent mainstream (bourgeoise)writings (and views on writing) from the 'margins'. Rexroth, Spicer and early Blaser were just these sorts of strong 'peripheral' voices that changed everything after them. I've always believed the Americans did the most with that European impetus.

And I can't talk enough about Gilles Deleuze, the guy who's had the most profound influence on the way I see writing, living, breathing, etc: a real liberatory presence.

I'm just about finished writing a deleuzian reading of bpNichol's "The Martyrology Part I" that I'll post soon.